Ssenfuka: The man behind diabetes herbal remedy

“Can I have the contact of David Ssenfuka whom you wrote about in the interview with Justice Katutsi? My mother has been given two days to die. The doctors say her diabetic condition which we have been treating for 10 years now has worsened. Please help me, my brother,” the voice on the other side of the line pleaded before I inquired to know who it was.

According to the caller, her mother had spent three weeks in hospital and this was the third time this year alone. She had been battling the disease and, “...the doctors have told me that she has reached the tail end (stage four). We spend over Shs700,000 every week to keep her in hospital.”
This is one of the so many calls we received following the publication of the article titled, “Justice J.B. Katutsi on battling and reversing diabetes”. By noon, I had received 92 calls requesting for the same contact of the herbalist. I took chances and called Ssenfuka who did not answer my three calls.

At 3pm, Ssenfuka returned my call saying he was going to switch off his phone.
“I have received 300 calls. Because I wanted to help I have been taking note of each call that comes in but the urgency is unbearable. What should I do?” he asked.
We found 36 emails on top of the 72 text messages from unknown numbers. The phone calls were relentless. After a week, the writer had received 654 calls while Ssenfuka’s call log doubled.

Following up with Justice Katutsi on how he had perceived the story, he replied, “The story was very good but I have so far received more than 200 calls, my son Peter who was mentioned in the story has received over 400. This is too much and I am going to switch off my phone.”
We set out to find out who Ssenfuka is.

Convincing him for an interview
In the previous interview, Ssenfuka had insisted that he only wanted to acknowledge that he had given Justice Katutsi the herb that healed him without exploring his [Ssenfuka’s] life. Sitting him down for this interview was an uphill task.
“I already told you I don’t want to speak to the media about my life. This herb, as I said, is neither registered nor certified. It could put me in trouble if I speak to you now. I have been trying to approach different government officials to see how we could have it registered but they have been giving me a cold shoulder,” he said before hanging up.

Two days later, Ssenfuka called me saying he was ready for the interview after getting “a go-ahead” from his lawyers. He offered to drive to Monitor Publications offices where he could feel secure to speak.
At 10.30am, outside office arrived a silver Toyota Corolla. A dark small-bodied and short man emerged. Donning a light-blue shirt tucked in a faded blue pair of jeans, he marched towards me. You could notice a slight bend in his back. One hand clutched three small phones and the other adjusted his sagging pair of jeans.
“Where is your pen and notebook? Are you really a good journalist?” he asked before I showed him my pocket notebook and pen. He asked that we change interview venue and we drove off.

The making of Ssenfuka
Ssenfuka, 37, says he got involved in treating diabetes in 2013 while going about his work in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. His close friend Mustafa Ibrahim, a Pakistani national, complained of constant hunger immediately after meals.
“I had seen my late grandmother Leonia Nalongo Nakiwala Namuganga who was a herbalist diagnose and prescribe for her patients who presented the same problem. We at the time couldn’t fathom the ailment but I offered to help my friend Ibrahim,” he says.
He said they travelled from Dubai to Uganda and it only took him three weeks after getting the concoction for him to be fine. That incident shaped spurred him to get deeper into herbal medicine and he started helping people with similar problem. Later he discovered that it is caused by diabetes.
Ssenfuka says on many occasions, his grandmother led their way to different forests and thickets where he intently observed her picking leaves from trees and shrubs.
“She started orienting me when I was about seven years old. When she became weak she sent me to the forest with instructions. I grasped the directions faster and I soon became her personal assistant, “he recalls.

Breakthrough
Ssenfuka dropped out of school because his grandmother could not afford the fees before he sat his primary living examinations. In 1995 his grandmother escorted him to the bus heading to Kampala.

“Go and get some work but return soon. Please take good care of yourself because I don’t want to lose you and you know what Kampala is like,” he recalls the words of his grandmother as she sent him off. He lived with different people before renting a small room in Kisenyi where he did odd jobs.

“I hawked plastics and with time, I started using my savings to import from Kenya,” he explains. One afternoon in June 1998, Ssenfuka chased after pickpockets that had robbed a woman and helped her recover her handbag. He later learnt that she was a bank manager at Stanbic Bank. He recalls only one name, Amooti. This is a pet name among the Banyoro and Batooro.
“When I returned the bag, Amooti told me to open an account in Stanbic Bank and she deposited for me Shs2m,” he says continuing, “She said she had lent me this money and I would refund it after making profits.”

This loan grew his capital and he started importing merchandise from Dubai for more than three years. He expanded to real estate; buying and selling houses and land. In 2006, after wedding Jane, Ssenfuka relocated to Dubai. “We wanted to change the environment and I had also made many friends who helped us settle in very fast. We didn’t know what would become of us,” he says.
Ssenfuka says he has since left his family – wife and daughter Father of Katarine Nanfuka, aged 13 – to continue his research about the herbs that have seen remedial prescriptions to ailing people in the community. He returned to Uganda in 2015.
Three years later, the Primary Seven dropout says he enrolled for adult education and attained an equivalent of Uganda Certificate Examination.

The government take
A report last year by the Wandegeya-based Natural Chemotherapeutics Research Institute (NCRI) – which looks to improve health and quality of life by accelerating progress in cancer-related research, through collaboration – conducted an animal test on the herb indicated and concluded that the concoction contains the following ingredients: “Saponins, tannins, alkaloids, reducing compounds, starch, anthocyanosides, anthracenosides, coumarins, flavonosides and steroid glycosides. It indicates that eight of these are curative of diabetes.

Grace Nambatya, the director of Research, NCRI who signed the report says the research requires much money to take off among other limitations they face as an institute.
“As government, there is no policy yet to guide herbal medicines and how they can be registered. But also his research needs a lot of money. It is an enormous project,” she says during an interview at her office a fortnight ago.

Cured
Capt Kasim Ramathan who is the former governor of South Buganda Province during Idi Amin’s regime f 1970s, says his sugar levels had been fluctuating between 13.6 and 11.5 for more than two decades. He got Ssenfuka’s concoction in 2015 and he says the sugar levels are between 5.1 and 5.5.
“I had a wound on my foot after serving a prison sentence of 24 years in Luzira Prison. I met Ssenfuka through his relatives in 2015 in Masaka District and he administered his herbs on me. I am now okay. I resumed taking all food that the doctors had stopped me from,” narrates the retired soldier at his Bombo home.

Investing in the herb
Ssenfuka laments about what tall order it has been for him to invest and make people believe in what his medicine can do. He says it has failed to be recognised by the Ministry of Health (MoH) and World Health Organisation (WHO).
“It is expensive for me to invest in the process until people get cured. Since the medicine is not yet registered, I don’t want to be mistaken for extorting money from people, so I treat them for free. However, it takes time to look for the herbs,” he says. Many of those he treats give him a token in return and recommend others.
This newspaper has seen a couple of recommendation letters to the MoH and WHO from high profile government officials to have the herb tested on humans but Ssenfuka says it has been futile.

In his letter dated April 24, 2020, addressed to the Permanent Secretary to the Ministry of Health, Uganda’s former ambassador to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, Dr Rashid Yahya Ssemudu, testifies that he has used the herb and it cured him.
“I hereby recommend Mr David Ssenfuka, a local herbal researcher involved in a diabetes research project. The researcher has made a number of key steps including working with the NCRI,” the recommendation letter reads in part.
Dr Diana Atwine, the Permanent Secretary of Ministry of Health, says she received a call from Ssenfuka but advised him to see the director general who would arrange for a presentation to the committee.
“If these emails ever came in, I didn’t read them. He should come and we take this herb through clinical test before we take it to National Drug Authority (NDA) for approval. This is exciting to hear,” Dr Atwine said in a telephone interview.

Today
Some patients we followed up were introduced to the herb after the story ran three weeks ago have since reported a significant improvement. Ssenfuka has since filed a civil case number 120 of 2020 against the Attorney General of Uganda and WHO for failure to take up the herb for further tests. He hopes that government takes on the production of the medicine and develops a vaccine against diabetes.
He also says he would like to try other countries and donors who can help him open a place where people can access his consultation services from.

A November 2019 study by Ministry of Health reveals that over 400,000 Ugandans are diabetic. Dr Gerald Mutungi, commissioner in charge of non-communicable diseases, says the number of Ugandans with diabetes have numbers have surged due to the changing life styles of people who eat fatty foods but don’t exercise. We encourage people to exercise and do routine checkups because it presents in advanced stages.

FYI
Did you know?
Dr Frederick Nakwagala, a diabetes consultant Mulago hospital, says there are types of diabetes which could be reversed but signs could resurface after some time.
”For instance, if diabetes has been caused by obesity, we do a bariatric surgery and we remove the lipids from the body. This is common in type two diabetes. Then the diabetes will be reversed. We can also reverse the diabetes which is caused by goiter. We have removed the goitre signs, that diabetes is supposed to be reversed,» he says.